


Clever Boy

by lightgetsin



Category: Vorkosigan Saga
Genre: Gen, Memory, Parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-17
Updated: 2007-01-17
Packaged: 2017-10-02 09:33:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightgetsin/pseuds/lightgetsin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cordelia, upon receiving Miles's message in <i>Memory</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clever Boy

**Author's Note:**

> By request of [](http://fuzzyboo03.livejournal.com/profile)[**fuzzyboo03**](http://fuzzyboo03.livejournal.com/), who waited so patiently for it.

Well. That certainly explained the odd brusqueness in Alys's and Simon's and Gregor's last few messages.

Cordelia set the recording to replay the instant it finished. Miles looked like hell; not one of the melodramatic turns he still indulged in sometimes, but rather the stiff-faced shambling of someone too concerned with the things going on behind his eyes to take much notice of the things in front of them. Walking wounded. A horrifying little twist of military poetics – alliteration from the overwhelmingly illiterate – but bizarrely hopeful for all that. Wounded, yes, but walking still.

Cordelia paused the recording, bent her head, opened one hand over her face as if he could see her, two planets away. She let the secret, savage joy come. _Out, and alive this time_.

Beneath that, vicious undertow, was the fear. Cordelia dropped her hand, leaned forward, examined Miles's face. He looked as if he were delivering a particularly unpleasant report to an exacting superior officer. That look made her heart hurt, always had. She wanted to gather him in, press him close, cradle the fragile skull and its busy, precious brain in her cupped hand. She'd not been allowed to do things like that since he was very, very young, certainly too young for him to have figured out that it was as often for her benefit as for his. He might, perhaps, know better now, but she wouldn't swear to it. She still found it painfully ironic that he, favored target of the most unpleasant symptoms of their peculiarly Barrayaran strain of male stupidity, had developed such a raging case of his own.

But that was her boy, after all, hers and Aral's and Piotr's and Barrayar's. He laid his successes at their feet like a tithe, and lived every day with the most exacting superior officer of them all ticking away in the back of his head. She'd tried everything she could think of, but there were some things you just couldn't be told, and he still hadn't figured out that she didn't care about these tiny things, the medals and promotions and many many ways he tried to rewrite himself -- _you'll remember this about me first if I have to die for it; you see me as tiny, so I shall be enormous_. He had yet to figure out that the master whose whistle he kept running to was closer to home than his own parents, and that all he'd ever needed to do to satisfy them was be safe and happy.

Cordelia sighed, suddenly tired. That was one of the very few things that could jerk her out of sleep these past few decades, prickling with cold sweat and fear -- _oh God, have I failed?_ Because it seemed that, for him, happy and safe were far to often mutually exclusive. It sometimes seemed that he'd been born that way – not surprising, given the circumstances – and in thirty years he hadn't yet figured out that there were other ways of living. In bleaker moments, she feared he never would.

And now here he was, at an impasse, great river suddenly dammed. She could see it there behind his eyes, the swirling consternation of great forces diverted, uncertain how to spend themselves as the pressure slowly mounted. What would he do, her clever, stupid boy? He might break his banks, run wild to the flood and leave a high, unholy mess behind him. Cordelia closed her eyes, pressed her lips tight. They would follow the current, she and Aral, if he wanted to bring high water to hell's own gates. God, but she hoped he'd figured _that_ out, at least. And yet. And yet . . .

_Come on. My own clever boy, if you've ever been clever, come on. There are other ways. Please . . ._


End file.
